Author: Brad Zellar
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You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does
What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am? I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end…
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Three Weeks, from Which We Can Conclude Virtually Nothing, So I Will Talk Instead about Vivisection
AP Photo/Jim Mone I love baseball stats, love them as least as much or more than the next woman. And like so many others, the explosion of the statistical analysis of baseball was what drew me deeper into the grip of the game at a moment in my life when I was just starting to…
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Confidence Game: A Case of the Yips in the Motor City
AP Photo by Duane Burleson We’ve been spoiled. While the Twins starting pitching and offense have too often been an iffy, up-and-down proposition throughout most of the 21st century, the bullpen has pretty consistently owned the late innings and protected leads. It was easy, in fact, to take them for granted. It didn’t seem to…
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The Postponement Blues
Early April baseball in the Midwest can be a flat-out teeth-kicker. Baseball, of course, can kick your teeth in on a regular basis no matter the month, but shit like last night is brutal, even if it (literally) comes with the territory. Couldn’t they at least have given us a rain delay, so we could…
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Paper Tigers, etc: Seriously, People, It's Still Too Damn Early to Even Have This Conversation
AP Photo, by Paul Battaglia I walk away happy as a clam from any baseball game that features a successfully executed suicide squeeze. It’s a great, gutsy, and increasingly rare play, and last night, with the Kansas City Royals in town (I actually heard some radio guy refer to them as the "red hot Royals"),…
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Opening Night: And So It Begins. Again.
AP photo by Tom Olmscheid Representatives of the local sporting press —of which I am a decidedly derelict member— were packed cheek to jowl in the Herb Carneal Memorial Press Box at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome Monday night. It was not, as you might imagine, a pretty picture. If somewhere there exists an International…